Gunnhild 4

Gunnhild daughter of Earl Godwine, fl. 1066x1087
Female
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Gunnhild

Summary

Gunnhild 4 was a younger daughter of Earl Godwine of Wessex and Countess Gytha. In 1066 she was a professed virgin probably living outside any formal convent and supported instead by four of the family’s manors in Somerset and Sussex, together assessed at around 30 hides and worth some £30. After the Conquest she remained in England until 1068 or 1069, when she escaped with her mother to Flanders, dying at Bruges in 1087. The lead plaque buried with her coffin has survived and gives some details of her life.

Distribution map of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

List of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

Holder 1066

Shire Phil. ref. Vill DB Spelling Holder 1066 Lord 1066 Tenant-in-Chief 1086 1086 Subtenant Fiscal Value 1066 Value 1086 Value Conf. Show on Map
Somerset 1,18 Creech St Michael Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - William, king - 10.50 9.20 9.20 A Map
Somerset 1,24 Hardington Mandeville Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - William, king - 10.00 12.70 12.70 A Map
Somerset 5,17 Claverham Gonnil Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances Fulcran 2.00 1.00 1.50 C Map
Sussex 13,29 Southwick Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine Harold, earl William de Briouze William fitzRanulph 6.75 7.00 7.00 C Map
Totals

Profile

Gunnhild is explicitly identified as ‘the daughter of Earl Godwine’ in the Exon entry for the Somerset manor of Hardington Mandeville (Exon 107); the phrase was dropped by the scribe of GDB and does not appear in connection with any of the other three mentions of Gunnhild. Hardington was retained by King William in 1086, and was listed in DB in a section of the Terra Regis which covers manors which had belonged to members of Earl Godwine (Godwine 51)’s family: his widow Countess Gytha (Gytha 1), his sons Earl Harold (Harold 3) and Tosti (Tosti 2), Gunnhild herself, her sister Eadgifu (Eadgifu 46)(Som. 1:11–25)Harold’s son Godwine. Creech St Michael appears in the same section and can be assigned confidently to Gunnhild 4. The values of both Hardington and Creech were given as renders in multiples of 23s. blanch (de albo argento, literally ‘of white silver’), diagnostic of the comital estates in Somerset, Creech at £9 4s. (8 × 23s.) and Hardington at £12 14s. (perhaps a transcription error for £12 13s., which is 11 × 23s.).

The third Somerset manor entered with the TRE holder’s name as Gunnhild, Claverham, was different in almost every significant respect from Hardington and Creech. Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, not the king, held it in 1086; it was valued at a round 20s. rather than the comital 23s.; and it has the owner’s name not only spelled differently (Gonnil as against Gunnild in GDB) but given in Exon with the contraction mark indicating a masculine ending (Gonnill[us]). Other commentators have consequently excluded it from the property of Earl Godwine’s daughter, assigning her only two Somerset manors (Freeman: IV, 754; Loud 1989: 15; Clarke 1994: 25; Barlow 2002: 120; Mason 2004: 183).

There are nonetheless good grounds for thinking that Claverham was hers too. Bishop Geoffrey certainly held one Somerset manor that had been Earl Harold’s, namely Lullington (Som. 5:51); Lullington, like Claverham, had a round valuation rather than a multiple of 23s., and it may have been some feature of both that encouraged the king to give them away to his brother rather than keep them in his own hands. Moreover, Claverham resembles the two Somerset manors which were undoubtedly Gunnhild 4’s in that it lay immediately adjacent to a substantial manor belonging to another member of her family: Claverham abutted Earl Harold’s manor of Congresbury (Som. 1:21) just as Creech abutted his manor of North Curry (Som. 1:19) and Hardington their mother’s manor of Coker (Som. 1:23).

The Sussex manor ascribed to a Gunnhild can also be assigned to Earl Godwine’s daughter. It was entered in DB under the place-name Kingston but has been convincingly identified as Kingston’s eastern neighbour Southwick, on the Channel coast at the mouth of the Adur near the small port town of Shoreham (VCH Suss. I, 447 note 5; VCH Suss. VI (1), 176). Earl Godwine’s father originated in Sussex and the family retained a great deal of land there in 1066. Kingston proper, like Gunnild’s Southwick, was held from Earl Harold (Suss. 13:28), and nearby manors belonging to members of the family included another which passed with Southwick to William de Braose’s man William fitzRanulph, namely Woodmancote (Suss. 13:22).

Gunnhild’s Sussex and Somerset manors were 120 miles apart, and the three properties in Somerset were themselves widely scattered; but such dispersal was unimportant to a noble lady, for whom they were merely a source of income. Her landed estate, at around 30 hides worth £30, was one of the smallest of any identifiable member of the great comital families in 1066. It was small not only because she was a younger daughter but specifically because she was a professed religious, according to the details of her life provided by the inscription which accompanied her body at burial (Freeman: IV, 756–7; 2nd edn 754–5; Sharpe 2007: 25; Crick and van Houts 2011: 228).

Gunnhild was clearly one of the younger children of Godwine and Gytha, and the best guess is that she was born in the early or mid 1040s (Mason 2004: 35), since she was described as being still of marriageable age in 1066, remaining unmarried because she had been dedicated as a virgin while still a girl. There is no evidence that she was ever a cloistered nun. Eventually she left England, probably with her mother in 1069, and went to Saint-Omer, the most important centre of the counts of Flanders in the western part of their county (Nicholas 1992: 36–7, 46–7, 117–18), where she remained (according to her memorial inscription) for ‘a few years’ (aliquot anni) before removing to the more important city of Bruges; after ‘some years’ (quidam anni) she paid a visit to Denmark, and died on 24 August 1087 back in Bruges, where she was buried in the church of St Donatian. Her gifts to St Donatian included relics which she probably acquired when her brother Harold was amassing a collection for Waltham minster, a mantle of St Brigid of Kildare which Harold had perhaps acquired in Ireland in 1051, and a psalter glossed in Old English (Rogers 1992: 166–7; Walker 1997: 35, 192–3).

Bibliography


Barlow 2002: Frank Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (London: Longman, 2002)

Clarke 1994: Peter A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)

Crick and van Houts 2011: A Social History of England, 900–1200, ed. Julia Crick and Elisabeth van Houts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Freeman: Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results, 6 vols, revised edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875–9 [I and II in 3rd edn, 1877; III and IV in 2nd edn, 1875–6; V and VI, 1876–9]

Loud 1989: G. A. Loud, ‘An introduction to the Somerset Domesday’, The Somerset Domesday, [ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine] (London: Alecto Historical Editions, 1989), 1–31

Mason 2004: Emma Mason, The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon and London, 2004)

Nicholas 1992: David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London: Longman, 1992)

Rogers 1992: Nicholas Rogers, ‘The Waltham abbey relic-list’, in England in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Carola Hicks, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 2 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992), 157–81

Sharpe 2007: Richard Sharpe, ‘King Harold’s daughter’, Haskins Society Journal, 19 (2007), 1–27

VCH Suss. I: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Sussex, I, ed. William Page (London: The St. Catherine Press, 1905)

VCH Suss. VI: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Sussex, VI, Part I, ed. T. P. Hudson (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1980)

Walker 1997: Ian W. Walker, Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997)